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What If Everything We Thought We Knew Was Wrong?

Is our world really headed for an apocalypse and major scientific revisions?

Another Earth Day has come and gone. The occasion was enthusiastically celebrated globally by many, ignored by many others. However, during the past week leading up to the event, the Glenn Beck radio program carried an historical series on the major persons and events that brought about Earth Day’s founding in 1970. It amounted to a catalog of gargantuan gloom-and-doom predictions, virtually none of which ever materialized. On the first Earth Day, for example, all the rage concerned humanity’s necessity of preparing for another ice age.

Concomitant with the Beck programs, I made some other surprising discoveries that, so to speak, rocked my confidence in what is considered “given.” An essay appeared in the March issue of Imprimis, written by Charles Leerhsen, titled “Who Was Ty Cobb? The History We Know That’s Wrong.” The essay pertained to Leerhsen’s recent book, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, in which, after meticulous research delving into many primary sources, Leerhsen reveals that Cobb was actually the victim of malicious, manufactured untruths regarding his character and personality. The legends that he was racist, cheating, irascible and (possibly) murdering were fabricated and perpetuated in the media with no basis in fact. He was actually—in additional to being one of the greatest baseball players ever—a fine, honest, upstanding fellow beloved by many of his contemporaries. Well, who knew?

What’s more, a Bible study class I intermittently attend at a local church presented a video lecture last Sunday on the Book of John, conducted by the Biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson. In his presentation Johnson asserted that 19th century scriptural critics had contended that John’s Gospel was a late, Hellenistically shaped, “Platonic” Gospel, much at odds with the mainstream Jewish thought and tradition evident in the Synoptic Gospels. However, now archaeology has begun to confirm the Gospel’s accuracy relating to Palestine, Samaritan/Jewish relations and Jewish messianic expectations. Indeed, he states, “The religious and ethical dualism that earlier scholars considered Greek is found in much the same form in the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran [a Jewish sectarian source],” thus turning the earlier scholarly opinions upside down!

Nevertheless, the jackpot of the week occurred on Wednesday when I serendipitously stumbled onto a new book by an author named Simon J. Lewis titled Our Incredible Shrinking Planet, a book espousing a theory that renders much of history, archaeology, astronomy and general science obsolete. A theory that explains a good many phenomena that have to date puzzled scientists. Quite simply, the author lays out the case for Earth—not symbolically nor metaphorically but literally—shrinking smaller and smaller over time due to an intensifying gravitational pull. The resulting forces then crush the planet in on itself and produce astronomical consequences for climate, the environment and all life. And this has no anthropogenic connection whatsoever, but rather is a completely observable natural phenomenon having been ignored by science up to the present even as it was measurably occurring on other planets as well.

Although born in England, Simon J. Lewis relocated to Australia where his passion for physics and quest for the “illusive Theory of Everything” flowered in the outback. Casting aside contemporary scientific dogma, he came to consider gravity as the “possible key to the process of the universe” and began to study it obsessively. Our Incredible Shrinking Planet, the result of many years’ work, is the first of a projected three-book series, which when complete, Lewis suggests, will supplant Steven Hawking’s Big Bang Theory.

The heart of Lewis’s cosmological perspective is his Theory of Increasing Gravity, or T.I.G. During the age of the dinosaurs, he believes, the gravitational magnitude of Earth was much less, something more comparable to what the Moon is now. This state is what allowed the animals to grow to such large dimensions and creatures such as the enormous, featherless pterosaurs to fly, feats impossible with our modern gravitational force. Also, considering that the earliest calendar reckonings of ancient Hebrew culture calculated a year consisting of 360 days, how did we gain 5.25 days at present? Lewis believes the shrinkage of the planet—obeying the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum—caused the Earth to rotate at increasingly greater speed, much like an ice skater pulling in her arms to spin faster on the ice.

Even more astounding is Lewis’s contention that a huge cataclysmic event occurred approximately 5,200 years ago, a major subduction in the Earth’s tectonic plates (initiated by gravitationally induced shrinkage crumbling the Earth’s crust) that “decimated civilizations around the world with earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, global winters and famine.” The evidence for this, Lewis maintains, is abundant in the world’s cultural and mythological literature which refers to a time of a great flood; in the archeological remnants of inundated civilizations along coasts; and the fact that many civilizations “restarted” themselves after this period in new locations in their advanced state. The sobering thing is, of course, according to the T.I.G., that such an event will unavoidably be repeated in the future.

The theory also purports to explain why the Earth is still 98% molten with an enormous center of heavy metals after 4.5 billion years of supposed cooling and setting. Well, naturally, the pressures of the shrinkage generate tremendous heat and necessitate ongoing volcanic activity. And Lewis goes on to address a plethora of topics about which his theory provides most interesting elucidation: relativity, climate change, the zodiac, Atlantis, Stonehenge, Vostok ice cores, metaphysics, the shrinking and departing Moon—on and on. Then, too, for those possessing a deep spiritual yearning to know our “Great Creator,” Lewis even allows that the “core of Divinity” just may be, you guessed it, Gravity!

Perhaps many readers will remember the 2009 motion picture 2012, a disaster film of sprawling proportion starring John Cusack? The premise was that a heating of Earth’s core, not the atmosphere above, resulted in a catastrophic upheaval of the land, devastating most of the planet. Volcanoes erupting, earthquakes splitting open fissures, the oceans flooding over shifting land masses. A fanciful depiction, perhaps, of what Lewis’s predictions-come-true might resemble?

Furthermore, I recall once at a psychic fair a channeler was asked the question, “What would it be like if God didn’t exist?” The “spirit” coming through gave an interesting response: “Everything would simply fly apart. God is what holds everything together.” Hmmmm. When you think about it, that seems to fit right in with Divinity’s core being “gravity,” doesn’t it.

The bottom line to all this, it seems to me, is that if Lewis’s theory attracts some serious attention, we could easily be on the cusp of a scientific paradigm shift. So long to Earth-Day-climate-change “assumptions” and the Big Bang Theory! Fare thee well, Mr. Hawking! In any event, a word to the wise would be to never utter that fatuous phrase: “The science is settled.” It isn’t. And moreover, it never will be.

Mark Scheel grew up in east-Kansas farm country. He attended both Kansas State University and The University of Kansas, majoring in psychology and English. Prior to writing full time he served overseas with the American Red Cross in Vietnam, Thailand, West Germany and England, taught at Emporia State University and was an information specialist with the Johnson County Library in Shawnee Mission, Kansas. His stories, articles and poems have appeared in numerous magazines including The Little Balkans Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Cincinnati Poetry Review, The Kansas City Star, Heritage of Kansas, Samisdat, and Poet as well as many sites online such as Common Ground News. His literary activities have also involved membership in The Kansas Authors Club, a seat on the board of directors for Potpourri Publications Company and an editorial position with Kansas City Voices magazine. He co-authored the book Of Youth and the River: the Mississippi Adventure of Raymond Kurtz, Sr., and his collection of stories and poems, A Backward View, was awarded the 1998 J. Donald Coffin Memorial Book Award. His most recent book is titled The Pebble: Life, Love, Politics and Geezer Wisdom.